In January of this year, the poet Roger Robinson, whom I’ve known since we were on the same poetry circuit in the nineties, won the UK’s most prestigious poetry prize, the T S Eliot Award for Poetry for his latest poetry collection, A Portable Paradise. He is the first black British person to win it, the second black man to win it, and the fourth person of colour to win the Prize since its inception in 1993. I was overjoyed at his success, in some ways mirroring my own Booker Prize win last year, as both of us have been treading the boards of literature for decades and these awards have suddenly brought our writings to the fore. Roger’s poetry collection is exactly the kind of book we need out there as British society is forced to register the prevailing inequalities on these shores through the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
